Oh my gosh, that icon! I love it. It really, really is the presentation for me. While reading I kept comparing Chambers' approach to, for instance, the seemingly throwaway sentence in Radch with captive huddled in a hallway, crying as they wait to be made into ancillaries. And OMG, how much more effective that is at conveying the horror than it would have been if it'd had been followed by two paragraphs of conversation in which the protagonists painstakingly spell out why those people are afraid and how what's going to happen to them is inhumane. I dug the worldbuilding, just wish there had been more of it and that Chambers had let it stand on its own more.
The characters were a bit frustrating, because the ones I found most intriguing (e.g., Pepper, Santoso's lover) were barely explored, while the ones whose traits most annoyed me (humorously spastic! humorously spastic on drugs!) got a lot more page real estate.
It also pissed me off that the morally questionable decision got farmed out to Corbin, the token non-enlightened character in the bunch, which felt like trying to have your cake and eating it too.
YES. YES, ABSOLUTELY THIS. And again, the novel would have been so much more interesting had Chambers been willing to confront that ambiguity. What do you do when there are no good choices? When good people make bad choices? And so on.
Positive characters are allowed to have actual flaws, and some developments even surprised me, which this book never did.
I don't think I'll ever read the sequels as I have so many other books to tackle, but I'm glad Chambers is improving with each volume. I think I found Angry Planet as frustrating as I did in part because the potential was so obviously there, just not fully realized.
no subject
The characters were a bit frustrating, because the ones I found most intriguing (e.g., Pepper, Santoso's lover) were barely explored, while the ones whose traits most annoyed me (humorously spastic! humorously spastic on drugs!) got a lot more page real estate.
It also pissed me off that the morally questionable decision got farmed out to Corbin, the token non-enlightened character in the bunch, which felt like trying to have your cake and eating it too.
YES. YES, ABSOLUTELY THIS. And again, the novel would have been so much more interesting had Chambers been willing to confront that ambiguity. What do you do when there are no good choices? When good people make bad choices? And so on.
Positive characters are allowed to have actual flaws, and some developments even surprised me, which this book never did.
I don't think I'll ever read the sequels as I have so many other books to tackle, but I'm glad Chambers is improving with each volume. I think I found Angry Planet as frustrating as I did in part because the potential was so obviously there, just not fully realized.